May 3rd, 2011.  Mark that on your calendar kids.  This is the day your 13 year wait will come to an end.  Gearbox Software and 2k Games have announced that Duke Nukem Forever will finally be released in North America on that date.  For most kids now a days, this means nothing.  I mean, hell, I was only 15 years old when this game was first announced.  The delays and development issues have been legendary to the point that there is a website dedicated to major events that have happened during its development or have taken less time to complete than this game.  For the love of Vecna, the U.S. government was able to develop the space program that landed a man on the moon in less time.  At long last, we can breathe a sigh of release but there is a downside… we just lost one of the last biggest jokes in the video game industry since Gran Turismo 5 actually came out too.  Hit the jump to view the reveal trailer.

PNG Bro Down Episode 41 – 3DeeznutS
Cast: James Jones, David Reid, Steven Mackowski
Guest Appearance: Logan Persons

Like an old friend that seems to have never left but you wish they would stay away, the PNG Bro-Down explodes back in to the podcast scene.  We waste no time in wasting time but still manage to talk about some relatively new games like Call of Duty: Black Ops (360), Starcraft II (PC), Xbox Kinect, Fable III(360), Forza III(360), Gran Turismo 5(PS3), Plants Vs. Zombies (PC), Amensia(PC), and 999 (9 hours 9 Persons 9 Doors) (DS).  There is, as always some comedy in there and some nerd bits like who are the villains in the next batman movie, James’ epic adventure to Philly, and Dave experiences 20 years of growing up in the span of 8 months.  There is much more, but as you expect, we have the attention span of Dave drinking half a bottle of Black Velvet and spilling it all over James’ brand new board game.

Comments, suggestions, or complaints?  Send to James.Jones@pixelsandgrids.com

Show notes:
-Show length is around 2.5 hours long
-Sound file is large due to the high sampling rate.  This will be reduced in the next cast
-Logan gets pulled in to the Skype cast in the first 15 minutes after the break.  He is not pleased.  =D
-Intro song is something that James Jones (guitar & vocals) and Ron Szalkowski (drums and vocals) cooked up for an intro to the podcast awhile ago.
-Break was cooked up by James Jones(Android), Ron Szalkowski(iPhone), and Logan Persons(iPhone) through apps on their smartphones.
-Outro is Faces by Scary Kids Scaring Kids off their self titled album.

Outtie 5k.

Gentlemen, behold!  What we have here is a Wii remote in the shape of the newest Doctor Who’s sonic screwdriver.  Perfect for when you buy Asylum Entertainment’s upcoming Wii game, Doctor Who: Return to Earth.  It will feature the likenesses of Matt Smith (Doctor Who) and Karen Killen (Amy Pond).  While I do enjoy the new Doctor, I’ll always be partial to David Tennant and his version of the sonic screwdriver.

Publisher:  Fantasy Flight Games
Designer:  Jakob Bonds
Players: 1 – 4
Ages: 13+
Play Time:  90 mins

MSRP:  $59.95

Grade: A-

Before you read on, know that this game is unforgiving and ball breaking hard.  Playing by the original rules without variation almost guarantees your character will die.  In DungeonQuest, you play one of six adventurers attempting to get to the dragon’s hoard in the center of Dragonfire Dungeon and get out before nightfall.  As nightfall comes the dungeon very well may seal you in forever and leave you at the mercy of Kalladra, the dragon who owns said hoard.  This sounds simple enough but the first thing you learn in this game is that it excels at killing player characters.  I used to think that Arkham Horror was the most brutal and difficult cooperative board game,  until we had our go with DungeonQuest.  It took eight full games with our friends for someone to actually survive Dragonfire Dungeon by getting to the loot and escaping.  While this may not sound enjoyable, there is a sick sort of pleasure you get as you continue to throw yourself in the game.  It becomes becomes an obsession… an unhealthy competition between you and the game.

DungeonQuest was one of the roughly 3 new games that were released or being sold early at Gencon this year by Fantasy Flight.  For days I scoped this game out.  Lurking around the demo tables, picking up the box and reading it, until eventually I took a risk and just purchased it.  It was a gamble considering that if I could have just mustered the patience, I would have been able to demo it first.  There was just something that screamed to me when looking at this game though.  All of the cards, the random dungeon tiles, and THE ADVENTURE!  It called out to my inner geek that clamored to loot and plunder a dragon’s dungeon without the time needed to create and nurture a character.  I was too weak to resist it’s siren’s call and soon found myself unwrapping it in our hotel room for our very first game.  By the end of the first turn, Josh Sabol’s character was dead and the rest of us were either hurt or very very scared…

The materials and card stock of the game are up to the typical Fantasy Flight standards.  Everything has that thick textured feel to it that make it feel durable and able to stand up to many games.  The set up of the game itself is fairly quick despite the daunting amount of cards and tokens.  There are six  large sized character cards, a dungeon exploration deck, crypt exploration deck, dead adventurer deck, a search deck, trap deck, treasure deck, door deck, and catacombs deck.  There is also a community combat card deck and 4 different unique power cards for each of the six player characters and the five different monsters you may encounter in the dungeon.  There are also different types of tokens for stuff like your damage, monsters, and determination.  Finally, there are 6 different plastic unpainted mini’s that represent the player characters and over 100 dungeon tiles.

After picking characters, placing the different decks on the game board, and separating the tokens, players then decide who goes first and take turns picking which corner of the board their adventurer starts at.  There is no real advantage to which corner you start at as the board starts completely blank.  The marker that is used to keep track of time in the dungeon is then advanced one spot.  Whenever it is the first players turn, you advance the marker again until it gets towards the end.  The spaces at the end will have some numbers on it that indicate a number or range of numbers the first player will want to roll above at the start of a new round.  If you roll equal to or less than that number, the game immediately ends and anybody still stuck in the dungeon is trapped and killed by the dragon Kalladra immediately. 

During your turn you get one space of movement.  As soon as you move in to a blank space, you draw a dungeon tile at random from the available tiles.  There is always a little arrow on the tile that must point towards the space you entered from.  If you drew a tile, you follow the instructions for that specific tile.  If you’re not moving in to a blank space, you still follow the instructions for that tile.  The back of the rulebook has the descriptions, but after a few games, you really won’t need it.  A tile may require you  to draw from the dungeon exploration deck, make certain attribute checks, or just let you continue on to draw another tile.  Since the board always starts out blank and tiles are drawn randomly, this means the dungeon should never really look the same in each game session.  There is one particular tile, the bottomless pit, that will kill you outright if you fail an attribute check.  This is what happened to Josh Sabol on our very first game on his first turn. 

You can also delve into a network of tunnels underneath the dungeon called the catacombs.  If you happen to get a tile or draw a card that allows you to go down there, you place a marker on the board that indicates the direction you wish to travel and then start drawing from the catacombs deck at the beginning of each of your turns.  You then do whatever the card says and keep it in a pile in front of you.  If you draw a card that allows you to exit, you count the amount of cards that you have in front of you and move your marker that many spaces in your indicated direction.  You then roll a six sided die and shift the marker that many spaces your choice of either right or left.  You then pop up in the dungeon in that space and shuffle the catacomb cards back in to the deck.  If you pop up in a blank space, you draw a tile and do what it indicates.  If you come up in an actual tile, you just do what you would normally do if you had drawn it yourself.  Running around in the catacombs has it’s ups and downs.  On one hand you can traverse the dungeon rather quickly without fear of drawing a dangerous dungeon tile and may draw one of the most valuable treasures in the game.  On the other hand, as with most cases in this game, drawing from any of the decks is a dangerous proposition and will most of the time lead to death or injury. 

Most of the tiles are fairly harmless and just require you to draw from the dungeon exploration deck.  Any number of things can happen from from the room being empty, a monster popping out, or the ability to draw from one of the other decks (crypt, dead adventurer, or trap).  Most of the time, drawing from any of the decks, with the exception of the treasure deck, is a bad call.  However, we found ourselves taunting the other players to man up, take a chance, be a true adventurer and draw from the decks no matter what the cost.  Sometimes we would get treasure or coins for our bravery, but most of the time it only lead to woe.  Monsters would pop out of nowhere or skeletons would spring to life leading to combat.

If there is anything I can lodge a valid complaint about it wouldn’t be the fact that you die a lot, it would have to be the randomness of the combat.  At the start of combat, the player to the left of you draws a monster token that matches the specific one being fought that lists it’s hit points.  They then get to play combat cards for that monster.  There are only five different monsters that you can fight in the dungeon and each have four unique power cards like the adventurers.  Both the adventurer and the monster draw a power card at random from the four and then draw four cards from the combat deck.  From then on it becomes a guessing game of paper, scissors, rock.  There are three different type of combat cards: melee, ranged, and magic.  Each card has a specific value ranging from one to five in the top left hand corner and some have a counter attack symbol in the right hand corner.  Players pick a card from their hand and then lay it face down in front of them.  When both players have selected their cards, they flip it over and whomever has the highest number wins.  Sounds simple enough… and boring.  There is a twist to it though.  It is possible for the player with the lower amount to do a counter attack if their counter attack symbol matches the type of attack the other player put down.  If it matches, that player can then continue to add cards with a matching counter attack symbol until their total either matches or exceeds the other players total.  Ranged will counter melee, melee counters magic, and magic counters ranged.  Counter attacks cannot be counter attacked.

After players are done playing cards, the winner then takes all of the cards they played and put them in the loser’s damage stack.  Each card counts as one point of damage, so you can see why you might want to play a low value card in hopes to counter attack.  The loser than puts the card(s) they played in the combat stack.  In the case of a tie, all cards go to the combat stack.  The combat stack serves as a way to play what’s called a deathblow.  If a player wins a combat round, and there is a matching attack type in the combat stack, then they can pull those cards and add them to the damage.  Say there are 3 melee attack cards in the combat stack and you successfully win a combat round with a melee attack, you get to pull those cards from the stack and add them to the opponents damage stack.

While all of this makes combat interesting, both you and your opponent are still drawing cards back up to five from the same combat deck at the end of each round.  Having one special power card for your specific character per combat doesn’t make the combat seem any more unique.  It feels the same no matter which character or even monster you play.  Luckily, combat isn’t very common in most games and the monsters usually do not have a lot of hit points.  Well, except those damn demons.

So if you manage to fight your way through killer dungeon tiles, deadly cards, and dangerous monsters to the dragon’s hoard, you will be rewarded with untold fortune… maybe.  When you start your turn in the treasure room you have to actually draw a dragon card to see if Kelladra is sleeping.  The dragon deck consists of 8 cards, seven sleeping cards and one dragon rage card.  As you draw cards, the deck does not get reshuffled until all adventurers are out of the room.  This means your chances of waking the dragon slowly increase the longer you stay in the room and the more adventurers that are looting.  If the dragon is sleeping, you can draw two treasure cards and continue to loot the hoard on your next turn.  If the dragon is awake, all players in the room immediately discard all treasure, roll two six sided dice, and take that much damage.  Everybody  then has to move into an adjacent and unoccupied square.  For most adventurers, this will kill them on a high roll. 

So, lets say you somehow managed to make it to Kelladra’s lair and swipe some treasure.  That, my friend, is only half the battle.  You now need to trek back through the entire dungeon to get back to one of the corners of the board.  This means either taking the same path you traversed to get to the center, or creating a new path of randomly drawn tiles to make it out.  All of this needs to be done before the time marker gets to the end and the first player rolls a low number.  There have been a handful of games where a few of us have made it to the hoard only to have died mere squares away from the exit. 

You have to wonder after reading all of this, “Why did he give the game an A-“?  While the combat knocked down my grade a little bit, it was still entertaining and had a bit of strategy built in.  Besides that, the game is solid and enjoyable.  Even when one of us is losing or dead, we were still having a good time and it only drove us to want to play the game more.  We found ourselves feeling tangible dread with each tile pulled, with each card drawn.  The fact that players actually get to control the monsters and fight other players also gives a sort of smug satisfaction when you take them out of the game.  It has a way of making you to fight both the game and the other players.  It causes players to cheer in unison when someone makes it out of the dungeon or passes an otherwise impossible attribute check.  While there are single player rules, I could not possibly fathom playing this on my own.  It would cause me to miss the actual emotion that this board game draws out of it’s players.  An almost palpable rage against a piece of cardboard and cards. 

There are few board games that I know of that can do this.

With Gencon a mere weeks away, we want to take a moment to reflect on our time spent as amatuer bloggers at last years convention.  The days were full of interviews, demos, gaming, and a couple of podcasts.  You can find a list of all our Gencon ’09 articles in our PNG Gencon ’09 Wrap Up post.  We covered as much as we could but obviously there was some stuff we didn’t get to post about or even have a chance to experience.  The size and scope of Gencon is so big that there simply isn’t enough time to do everything.  It’s has become so large that gaming events are starting to push into a day or two before the convention for the die hard attendees.  We tried our best to convery this  last year through a series of articles leading up to the convention.  The series started with the first article detailing the dealer hall.  If you click that link you can walk through all four articles that also cover gaming at the con, non-gaming events, and a the social aspect of the con.  All of these articles are an excellent resource for first time con attendees but can also serve as fuel for the fire that burns within everybody who has been to the con and can’t wait for August 5th to roll around.

This year, expect much of the same.  We’ll get a few pre con articles up and get whatever we can done during the con.  The majority of articles will start to pour out after the convention.  If you are one of the poor souls that cannot make it this year, let us know if there’s something that you wanted to try or see.  We’ll do our best to give it a go and then put up some information about it.  Keep checking the site before and during the con as PNG prepares for the best four days in gaming.

We continue to fall into the good graces of the Wizards of the Coasts PR gods and have recieved 3 spoiler cards for the upcoming Magic: The Gathering 11 set.   With Origins in full swing and Gencon just a mere 40 days away, Magic fever should be at an all time high.  What better time to give you a sneak peek of a common, uncommon, and rare you can expect to see in the next set.  As a fan of red/green decks, I couldn’t be happier with Fiery Hellhound and Obstinate Baloth.  While I have been out of the game for quite some time, it seems that the Crystal Ball artifact may find itself right at home in any blue control deck.  Our resident MtG writer, Kyle Boddy, may just have to step in here and let us know exactly how good each card is and where it may find a place in tournament play.  Hit the jump for a complete view of all three cards!

PNG Bro-Down Episode 40 – Trunk Full of Felicia Day’s Apple Pies
Cast:  Dave & James

In this episode, we bump up the bass for you gentlemen and ladies and keep adding to the PNG dance party mix.  In this episode we discuss the Savage Worlds tabletop RPG, MOAR Mario Galaxy 2, Alan Wake, Felicia Day’s delicious apple pies, Final Fantasy 13, trunks fulla amps, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Gencon media guests of honor, and the E3 keynotes of Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, and EA.  Oh, and Felicia Day, we really do love your apple pies… but could you maybe surprise us with a blueberry or peach one next time?

Show notes:
-Show length is 2 hours and 15 minutes.
-The sound quality should be noticeably better.  We also earn our explicit tag with our intro/break song.
-The intro and break song is Trunk Fulla Amps by Self off of their Gizmodgery album.  There is quite a bit of  swearing in it so you might want to wear some headphones.
-Outro song is Do You Want To Date My Avatar by Felicia Day and the cast of The Guild

PNG Bro-Down Episode 39 – Amateur Hour
Cast:  James, Dave, and Logan

Slowly, we rebuild the PNG Bro-Down to the oppressive and unsympathetic giant of the podcasting world with an appearance by old school caster Logan Persons.  In this episode, we talk about Warmachine & Hordes, Barack O-Lego-Bama, Matthew Porretta, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Mario Galaxy 2, Alan Wake, and other interesting and sometimes game related stuff.  In the news section we read off a list of games making an appearance by publisher and discuss they may have on this volatile industry.  Oh, and there’s some comedy in there for you.

Show notes;
-I am so sorry for the echo.  It’s coming from my USB headset and I hope to fix that in the next cast.
-The mixing in the first part is also a little unbalanced.  Once again, will be fixed in the next cast.
-Finally, around the two hour mark, Dave mutes his mic for a good 20 minutes and goes on a spectacular and terrifying rant that we wish you could hear.  We plan on breaking his mute button for the next cast. 
-The song for this week is Joe Esposito’s You’re the Best.

We just got word from Wizards PR pipeline that Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers will drop on June 15th via Steam.  Not content with giving you the core game and the first expansion for the low low price of $9.99, Wizards is also giving away a free Nissa Revane foil promo card if you pre-purchase it and live in a participating country.  As you can see, Nissa is getting all dolled up for the occasion and busting out her finest Kanyeezy lyrics for the crowd.   Details on how to get your foil promo can be found at the Duels of the Planeswalkers offical site early next week.  As for you Nissa, we’ll see you soon looking stellar in foil around the PNG offices.

Above is a 7min 49sec YouTube video of what appears to be a trailer for the next Mortal Kombat movie called Mortal Kombat Rebirth.  It’s a little gory, a little crazy, and a whole lot of sexy.  There’s speculation that this may just be a way to hype a Mortal Kombat game announcement during E3 or a pilot of sorts to get funding and interest to film an actual hard “R” rated MK.  Only time will tell, but one thing is for sure… Jeri Ryan is still pretty damn hot.